Modeling the climate

However, the individual parts of the climate system are characterized by widely differing time scale ranges. This disparity makes it impossible to represent all important components of the climate system simultaneously within a single comprehensive model. Therefore, a hierarchy of climate models must be developed for different applications involving different time scales and combinations of subsystems.

Building a climate model

Processes in the climate systems are governed by known laws of nature and can be expressed as mathematical equations, as for example:

• Conservation of mass
• Conduction of heat
• Equation of motion

However, since it is not possible to solve these equations directly, climate researchers develop numerical models from these equations that can be solved by computers.

First, the different parts of the climate system, e.g. the atmosphere, land surface, sea ice, and oceans, must be skillfully divided into millions of grid cells.

The evolution of climate properties such as temperature or the amount of water vapor within each grid box and the transport of these quantities between the boxes must be individually calculated using supercomputers.

This process is highly complex, requiring not only a thorough understanding of the physical processes, but also great skills in supercomputer programming. The smaller the boxes and the more processes that are calculated, the better the representation of real-world climate.